Review: Christopher Baldwin, Bruno (comic strip)

cross-hatched

I did something recently that I've rarely done before... I bought something creative online, solely on the basis of the (free) online content I'd already seen. I don't have the money to do that very often, but this guy's brilliant, frankly. Christopher Baldwin draws an online comic strip called "Bruno," which is about a woman named Bruno (her parents, freethinkers at the time, named her after famous heretic Giordano Bruno, himself a character in whom I have something of a passing interest).

Bruno's more alive than most of the flesh-and-blood people I meet, though I did know a woman much like her once. She's talkative and introspective and a witty auto-didact (but also prone to depression and drama), and Baldwin's careful black and white drawings bring Bruno, her friends, and her environment alive in a way that has very seldom been matched by any comic artist...

Plus, for the past year or three, Bruno has been (as Baldwin is, strangely enough) living in Portland, so he's been working in beautifully-drawn renditions of local landmarks like the Hawthorne Bridge, the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and the Japanese Gardens up in Washington Park. "Like the real thing, but cross-hatched," says Alas, A Blog.

After poking around a bit I went back to the beginning (1996) and read up; they are all good. And so then I ordered a book from his site - on the Friday of a holiday weekend, and it arrived on Tuesday, by the way, a turnaround of one business day - because I want this sort of thing to continue and, well, to have the thing in my own hot little hands.

If I've done this right and it's all working, this is the latest Bruno strip:

If you've got time and bandwidth to read online comics at all, this would be one to dive into. Baldwin's a pro.